The video of this is like if ABBA re-shot one of their videos in Hell. We approve.
[Video][Website]
[7.20]
Alex Ostroff: CREEP have proven that, if nothing else, they certainly know how to pick collaborators. Nina Sky’s “Move Ya Body” is one of the classic singles of the Noughties, and their one-hit-wonder status is one of the decade’s greatest disappointments. CREEP provide a space that is simultaneously feels lush and sparse, with an aura that walks the line between unsettling and entrancing. The tinkling music box chimes are as romantic as night stars and as disturbing as a horror movie soundtrack. Nina Sky, meanwhile, shift from unison to harmony and back, eventually staggering their vocals to enhance the sense of wooziness that pervades ‘You’. CREEP’s modus operandi is to plumb the depths of the ambiguous realm between romance, anxiety and menace. I’m certain that they could pull some different tricks out of their hat on future singles, but when you do something this well, why bother?
[9]
Michaela Drapes: The “rape gaze” scandal instigators perpetrate a lovely, sparse and dark collision with a Puerto Rican twin sister act who’ve previously had no problem with genre swapping between R’n’B and reggaeton, and who now look like they’re shopping at Oak. Remind me again why we quibble over genre labels, and who’s allowed to do and say what, and for whom?
[8]
Hazel Robinson: This is incredible — I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t this and now I cannot describe emphatically enough the need you have to hear the eerie’n’b spaciness of this song; all late-90s string-synth and wind-up machine gun beats, layered harmonies coming out of the sighing echo chamber of the obsessive break up/make it sexual fantasism, swirling cigarette smoke in the inertia of desire. I have listened to it twenty fucking times and I’m going to do it again — it’s like all the good bits of time/space being played with in indie lately, with all the staging and darkness of the best of current r’n’b; spellbinding, an artisan’s masterpiece.
[10]
Ian Mathers: I want to make it clear up front that I’m not giving this song any extra points for a video that makes it look like Nina Sky are joining Ladytron (although that’s awesome too). But the sisters Albino are a big part of why “You” is so great; they’ve stealthily put together a really interesting career (much as I love “Move Your Body,” I didn’t exactly see them going from there to here), and they continue to have a better grasp of how best to deploy their gorgeous voices than most of their peers. Match them up with CREEP, who make music that I’m pretty sure is what I was hoping Salem were going to sound like before I found out that they’re shallow dickheads, and you’ve really got something. Remember when Cassie’s “Me & U” came out, and some of us were hoping it’d usher in a new golden age of surprisingly spectral, glacial pop bangers? “You” ought to keep us going for a little longer.
[9]
Josh Langhoff: Is it just me, or does the blaring trumpet-y synth running through the ‘chorus’ remind anyone else of some theme from The NeverEnding Story? And is it just me, or is The NeverEnding Story the SEXIEST GOTH MOVIE EVER??? I mean, you’ve got the hero riding around with a Luck Dragon between his legs, Teeny Weeny sliding around on his snail, that sublime scene where the hero’s stallion sinks into the Swamps of Sadness, the freakin’ ROCK BITER tooling around on his massive rock-hard bike or whatever — I mean, everybody in that movie is always RIDING something. Way sexier than this song, anyway.
[1]
Andy Hutchins: What, are people already ripping off The Weeknd?
[3]
Jer Fairall: Where The Weeknd’s bleary-eyed, disassembled R&B reveals its link to Madonna’s Bedtime Stories, the oppressively ornate atmosphere voiding any emotional fluency the vocals might deliver. Interesting, if not all that memorable or re-playable.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: I’ve never been as enamored of Nina Sky as others, for the same reason that’s apparent here: they’re just voices, occasionally with flourishes and occasionally blank, competent but unrecognizable. Here, at least, they can be called production elements, like the rippling scrim of a backing or the twin tricks of dropping that skitter of a drum riff right when you’ve forgotten it’s imminent and adding the reverb back into the piano’s plinkiest keys. There are worse atmospheres to drift through.
[8]
Frank Kogan: For once Nina Sky live up to their name, as they float around, wisps of desire in the stratosphere.
[8]
Edward Okulicz: Nina Sky’s vocals float like ghosts’ above a succession of unnerving but beautiful production tics: clicking beats, a rifling heart stutter of a beat, music boxes and a haze of synth strings. The genius is in how expertly it’s arranged — all these elements work together to make a subtle but nonetheless dense collage without anything overwhelming the rest — and the artful, breathy sexuality Nina Sky bring to their parts is captivating. Are we being seduced or condemned? It’s hard to tell, because while “You” feels so starkly intimate, it unsettles as much as it dazzles with unexpected beauty.
[10]